Sir Andrew Motion 'ripped off history book for Remembrance Sunday poem'

Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, has been accused of ripping off work by a military historian for a Remembrance Sunday poem.

Ben Shephard said Motion's poem An Equal Voice had used 17 passages from his book A War of Nerves, which documented the effects of shell shock on soldiers.

Motion, who said his poem "stitched together" accounts from "a variety of sources", dismissed Shephard's claim of plagiarism by saying he was working in a long tradition of "found poetry" that dated back to Shakespeare.